The Cheaters

The Cheaters is one of the best, yet largely unseen, Christmas movies of all time. A winning combination of comedy and drama, it features stellar performances by two of the great character actors of the Forties, Joseph Schildkraut and Eugene Pallette. It delivers a positive message about the holiday, while also offering a cynical edge.

My husband's family loved this movie and rank it with It's a Wonderful Life. I can't remember seeing it or I saw it and don't remember it. I am like Chris from Philadelphia and have been scouring TV listings and calling all kinds of video stores to get a copy of it. Frake8 in Libertyville has seen it every year for 20 years. I am hoping that someone like Frake8 has a copy of it. I would love to surprise my husband one year with a copy of it. If someone has a copy of it, please email me and I will pay for a copy of it. I would be forever grateful and my husband would be in 7th Heaven.

This odd little film plays out like a Christmas spin on MY MAN GODFREY. The family of rich businessman Eugene Palette is in financial trouble and when they learn that an even richer uncle has died and left his fortune to a woman he didn't even know, a former child actress named Watson, they scheme to find her and keep her under wraps until the search period is over, when the money will revert to them. A homeless former actor (Joseph Schildkraut) who is staying with the family helps out with the scheme, but the dawning of Christmas Day brings some changes of heart.

The best thing about this film is its physical production; it's an A-looking movie produced by B-studio Republic Pictures. The actors are also bigger names than Republic typically used, though most of them were aging actors who had seen better days. The real problem is the writing; the screenplay could have used another draft or two, especially in character development. One daughter is built up as a kind of sly, whimsical type in contrast to the other who is more cold-blooded, but nothing is done with that potentially interesting tension. Old pros Palette and Billie Burke are fine, though their choice to underplay their underwritten parts takes some of the fun out of the proceedings. Schildkraut is good, but his character remains a cipher, not in a mysterious angel/ghost way, but in a way that suggests the writers didn't know what to do with him. There is solid support from Raymond Walborn, Norma Varden, and eternal butler Robert Grieg. TCM host Robert Osborne introduced this as "the best Christmas movie you've never heard of," and as I am familiar with almost every Christmas-themed Hollywood feature film ever made, he may be right, and I am grateful for the chance to have seen it, but it's not a gem I'll want to revisit often.

The Cheaters (also known as The Castaway0 is something of an unknown Christmas movie to the younger cinephile. Or perhaps because it came out of the low-budget Republic Pictures? It's simply just a forgotten one. So much so you will be hard pushed to see it mentioned on any Christmas film lists that flourish around the yuletide season. The film is based around an original story written by Frances Hyland and Albert Ray and concerns a sophisticated family inviting a washed up actor to their home for Christmas. As things progress we learn that this family are using the holiday season to secure a rich uncle's inheritance, but naturally all is not going to be plain sailing.

Heading the cast list is Joseph Schildkraut (The Shop Around the Corner), Billie Burke (The Wizard of Oz) and Eugene Palette (The Ghost Goes West). It's directed by Republic house jobber Joseph Kane, with photography and scoring coming from Reggie Lanning & Walter Scharf respectively.

So is the film any good though? Well it's safe to say that anyone looking for another old Christmas movie to boost the crimble spirit can safely add this one to their rota. It's very much in the mold of the likes of The Bishops Wife, which of course is no bad thing at all as a point of reference. My chief irk with the picture is that it flatters to deceive. By the midpoint the film has all options open to it, even threatening to be darker and perhaps leaning towards an ending of some surprise. But sadly, and without me crying out for any Pottersville type misery here, the film reverts to type and settles for a warm mince pie and a glass of mulled wine. Again, that's no bad thing at the season we choose to watch it in, but really it promised to be something more.

Still, it's a comfortable recommendation for the heart warming seeker. 6/10

The brief review singled out on the credits page of this movie gives a completely erroneous impression of it, so let me make it clear: This picture is a COMEDY. A FUNNY comedy. Like all the comedies of the Forties, it doesn't have the dizzy, gossamer charm of the screwball pictures of the early and mid Thirties. But it has many of the same characters (the tycoon who can't manage his own family, the tart-tongued secretary, the vacuous wife, the sponging brother in law, the spoiled elder daughter, the pert younger daughter, the butler who has seen everything) and many of the same actors (Eugene Palette, Billie Burke, Raymond Walburn). The script isn't hilarious, but it is consistently amusing, with many nice little digs at greed and hypocrisy.

So banish all thought that this is about some kind of angel in human shape who shows a materialistic family The True Meaning of Christmas (blaah!). Just enjoy some good jokes, lovely ensemble acting, and deft little character studies.

One ironic thing: Joseph Schildkraut was a wonderful actor, and he is lovely in this role, but from the minute he appeared, I thought, this is obviously a role for John Barrymore. I kept imagining how he would inflect one line, or how he would tilt his head and roll his eyes on another one. Also, Schildkraut's character having been a former matinée idol who played Shakespeare sounded like a description of Barrymore, which would have had resonance with the audience. Then I looked the movie up here, and saw that the part was indeed written with Barrymore in mind, but, sadly, he died too soon to play it. However, having the far less hammy Schildkraut in the role means that the movie remains an ensemble piece and is not, like Barrymore's other movies, a one-man show with all the other actors overshadowed.